James Munves

by James Munves

James Munves

The author James Munves (1922–2018) obtained his degree in English from Brown University. From 1970 to 1973 he lived in Colombia, home to more bird species than anywhere else in the world, where he wrote his manuscript of Andes Rising. Although the manuscript was finished in the 70s it was not published until 1998 when Munves stumbled upon it in his old files. Author of a number of books on history and contemporary issues, he has published short stories in various magazines including Confrontation and The New Yorker.

In James Munves’s novel Andes Rising the reader is confronted with a mystery. What happened to Thomas Cooper? A scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project and attended the disarmament conference following World War II, he had quit his job, left his family, and gone off to Colombia, South America on an ornithological project undertaken by the Peace Corps. His friends and family have lost all track of him. Finally his mother persuades her rabbi to go down to Colombia and find out if Thomas is dead or alive.…

New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.”